


Relics (Doomed to Repeat)

by AraSigyrn, deannawol



Series: Friday Night Firefight - Bad Nights and Big Cities [11]
Category: Adam Lambert (Musician), American Idol RPF, Kris Allen (Musician)
Genre: Interval fic, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-06
Updated: 2013-02-06
Packaged: 2017-11-28 10:24:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,365
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/673342
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AraSigyrn/pseuds/AraSigyrn, https://archiveofourown.org/users/deannawol/pseuds/deannawol
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kickstand brings back some old memories and Kris remembers old battles.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Relics (Doomed to Repeat)

"Should be the last of them," Cale said with a sigh of relief.

"Thank fuck," Kris coughed, trying to wave away the cloud of dust. "You didn't have to, man. I mean you really, really shouldn't have."

"What d'you want me to do," Cale mopped his brow. "Leave them to rot?"

"Ideally?" Kris looked around at the whole room full of crates and boxes. The living room had been mostly open space at ten o'clock that morning. The last box was taking up the last four square feet. "Yes?"

"I know y'don't mean that," Cale grinned. "Sides, how else is your boy gonna see your baby pics?"

"You didn't!!" Kris sucked in a lungful of dust and folded over wheezing. Cale caught his shoulders to steady him as his ribs buckled under the pressure. Kris wheezed in the smell of sweat and grease and worn cotton and waited for the dancing flecks of light to go away.

He felt rather than heard Cale's rumble. "S' a'right man, I got him."

There was a huff from the door to the bedroom. Kris managed to breathe without his chest lighting up his nervous system. Cale eased him back upright and Kris breathed in and out a couple of times before waving him away and taking a cautious breath alone. He could see the shadow just inside the bedroom door and focused on breathing easy and slow. The shadow disappeared after Kris managed to get his heart-rate back into the general green zone and Kris rubbed at his eyes.

"This can't all be mine," he said, looking around. 

"Naw," Cale grinned. "Those boxes are going to the shop soon as the fitters are done."

"So you're just using our living room for free storage?" Kris shook his head. "Cold, man, that's really really cold." 

"I figured you'd wanna go through the boxes," Cale said more seriously. "I don't remember half the stuff in here, but I know it's got the stuff from your apartment that the super didn't sell."

"It's got most of them too," Kris remembered. "Val said she'd bought most of it back through some contacts."

"All the more reason for you to check the boxes," Cale pointed out and Kris couldn't really argue. Cale hung around a little longer, sipping coffee and chatting about the world outside Kris' narrow little routine. Firecracker was busy with her latest acquisition - not that Kris was supposed to know that she'd bought out the owner of the _Spent Round_. Kris didn't really see the appeal of running a merc bar in NYC of all places.

He was planning a trip downstate and Kris was tempted. Adam's much delayed tour was moving into Europe over the next few months and Kris was starting to feel the anxious claustrophobia already. 

Amazing how the walls closed in without the glittering networks of the Net at his fingertips. Kris hadn't been back to the dojo in months; Nakamura point-blank refused to sign off on anything more taxing than walking down the stairs until Kris managed a month without complications. A trip with Cale, out of the city and away from the empty apartment, might be just what he needed.

Cale left eventually, promising to be back later to pick up what Kris and Adam didn't want to keep. Kris settled on the couch with his legs drawn up and sorted through the boxes. One was hard-copy photographs which meant it was Cale's, though Kris found an old data-chip carefully preserved in an insulated foil envelope. He looked through the pictures, smiling a little.

He hadn't ever cared about having his photo taken, though there was a photo the size of a postage stamp carefully cut out of one of the quarterly school booklets, showing him at his youngest and dorkiest. There were two other photos - one of Kris sitting primly on a wooden bench with his shoulders up, bracketed by Cale and Katy. He doesn't remember that photo being taken but there was enough for Kris to guess.

The wooden bench was the old detention site, before the NuDisciplineTM systems had been installed to help the principal optimize his time. Cale's expression was equal parts worry and exasperation and Katy was leaning into his shoulder. Disciplinary hearing then and no obvious bruises, so it hadn't been a fight. Had this been for hacking the grades database? Failing Zach Pine for being the greatest jerk in the whole state (and breaking Cale's arm during gym)? More likely, it had been one of the decorum complaints that the principal used as shorthand for 'I know you've done _something_ that I'll never prove was you'. 

Kris turned the page over and there was a "Summer 2021" in blue ink on the back in Cale's handwriting. He'd have to ask Cale if he remembered the details. The next few photos were mostly of Cale, still young enough to be spotty and lanky with new growth. Most of them also featured Kate, the side of the road and tools. Kris remembered that, sitting on browned verges with the sun burning down as Cale swore and fought to get one more mile down the road.

He was looking through his tech kit for a functional chip-reader old enough to read the chip, he had owned four or five readers that fitted that description back in San D but damned if he could find one now, when the background noises of Adam browsing through the boxes stopped suddenly. Kris looked up.

"You okay?" 

Adam's voice came from the living room. "Yeah. Yeah, I'm fine."

He sounded distracted and Kris poked his head out into living room, curious. "You don't sound sure of that. What, did you find Kickstand's old pinups or something?"

Cale's momma had tanned his hide for those pictures a time or two. She'd never taken the time to notice how more than half of them had motorcycles on the back. Kris hadn't ever forgiven her.

"Let's go for the 'or something' option,” Adam looked up from behind the last stack of boxes. "Don't suppose you want to explain the two boxes of badges?"

"You're kidding," Kris threaded his way past a few old sets of biker leathers that he was throwing into the incinerator first chance he got. "He kept the boy scout badges? Seriously?"

"Maybe. In one of these boxes," Adam grinned up at him. "You know your brother is a hoarder, right? That's not news to you or anything."

"No, really?" Kris smiled, leaning over Adam's shoulder to peer at the half-emptied box. 

"But I was kinda talking about these..." Adam turned enough that Kris could see the glint of the polished steel C-SWAT badge in his hand.

"Oh," Kris rocked back on his heels and shook his head. "Oh wow, I really didn't think he'd kept them."

"Is there a particular reason you've got the contents of a blooding box here?" Adam asked, eyes flicking from Kris back to the box. "I mean, CSWAT, MAXTAC, FBI, CISF, CForce... I think I even saw a Secret Service badge in here?" 

"You did?" Kris leaned back over and pushed aside a couple of shiny gold LAPD badges. "Huh, yeah. That was Special Agent Karina Dake. Glitch still owes me twenty from that one."

Adam took back the badge, running his fingers over it, looking for the signs of a forgery. Kris already knew he wouldn't find any. He remembered that badge. Finally Adam held the badge up in front of him. 

"This is a Secret Service badge," Adam sounded incredulous. "Do you have any idea how much one of these would go for on the street? You can't get your hands on these anymore. Hell, you've got badges from agencies that don't even exist anymore, corpsec badges from corporations that went to the wall or crashed out hard."

"Should be a complete set," Kris dodged the unspoken question. He shook his head, smiling a little bitterly. "Up to Spring '31 at least."

"Okay," Adam said slowly. "There's going to be a very good reason why you have two boxes of federal and corporate badges in our house.”

"'Good' might be stretching it," Kris admitted. He hadn't thought of the badges for years. Funny to think how hard they'd worked, how much they'd wanted the 'complete' set and how utterly pointless it seemed.

Adam straightened up, pushing the box away with a foot so he could pull Kris down onto the couch. "I'm listening." 

For a minute, for a couple of minutes, Kris considered saying nothing. Adam wouldn't push but he'd know that there was something Kris wasn't telling him. They’d both promised no more secrets and Kris wasn’t about to break that promise over something stupid.

He didn't look at Adam, or the still open box. "Trophies, I guess."

"I can understand trophies, I've got my share of them," Adam kicked the box. "But I'm not sure how you..."

Kris picked up the C-SWAT badge. "Special Lt. Hugh Dills," he'd promised to sell their brains to the highest bidder. He'd been leading the one street-sweep that Kris had been caught up in and Kris remembered how the burnished steel of his cyber hand had fitted all the way around Kris' throat. "Supervisory Agent Elnora Molyneux," FBI, who had been the first to authorize the Janus chips. Glitch wasn't the only one who still had nightmares of life as a corporate drone with just enough of your own mind left to know what had been done to you. "Detective Erik Petrowski," LAPD, who had come by OVERLOADED a couple of times and Kris had been bundled away in the cellar with Rose standing by the door with a baton. Kris had written the program that had ripped the bastard's life apart from the roots up.

"I guess you could call them reminders," Kris rubbed his thumb over the numbers. 89116-AHC, with little blood still staining the 'C'. 

Adam caught Kris' hand with the badges, thumb rubbing against his pulse. "You don't want to talk about it, that's okay."

"I'm not exactly proud of it," Kris admitted. "It's hard to explain how we used to be, back before...."

His voice cracked and Adam's grip tightened just for a second. "I'm not going to push, but you sound like you need to talk it out, babe."

"We thought we were invincible," they'd been so goddamn stupid. Kris shook his head. "We thought we'd never get caught. No, we _knew_ we were never going to be caught. So every time one of them bet their badge they'd get us...well, we collected."

It had been a game. That was the part Kris still couldn't believe. They'd played every system, rewriting filing systems to lose badges, hijacking courier systems to change delivery addresses. Once, Kris had walked straight into Sunset Central LAPD and left with three badges in his pocket. It had been so easy, no wonder they'd been so stupid and overconfident.   
"That's a lot of lives," Adam considered the box.

"We didn't kill them," stupid, overconfident and _idealistic_. It had taken five years in the Gauntlet to teach Kris that you couldn't fight a war without bloodshed. "We just made sure that they paid the price. I mentioned the fact that we were stupid, stupid kids, yeah?"

"Yeah," Adam squeezed his hand.

"We couldn't hurt them," Kris can remember back before they had backdoors in every system, when they were only one step ahead of the entire Fed-corp machine and one slip meant disaster. "Not the way they tried to hurt us. We couldn't kill them or arrest them. But we could take their badges. We could beat them and send them away, knowing they'd been beaten."

"Most probably walked straight into corporate security, you know?" Adam said mildly.

"On paper, sure," Kris grinned viciously, tossing the badges back into the box. They hadn't _just_ taken their badges; it was amazing how much damage you could do to a reputation with unrestricted access to HR file-fortresses. "If there was any corp stupid enough to give them actual power, they folded years ago."

"You proud of it?"

Kris considered for a few seconds before answering in the same neutral tone. "I was. Now, it seems childish, I guess?"

"I know that feeling," Adam threaded his fingers through Kris' shaking hands. "You know the big metal box in the safe room?"

"Yeah?"

Adam cleared his throat. "Those would be my trophies."

"And here I thought you just kept a tally on the bedpost," Kris said dryly.

"Running trophies," Adam clarified, eyebrow arching sardonically, “From jobs, other mercs who thought that they'd take me down, close calls."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah, babe, we all do it. We just don't tend to talk about it, I guess. Not all the stories are good," he kissed Kris' hand lightly. "I don't think any less of you, you know. It's just a way of marking history."

"Yeah. I guess." Kris kissed Adam properly. He didn't really want to relive these memories. DEx was better off dead but thinking about the 'Net made his plugs itch with longing.

Adam bent to pick up the box, rattling the badges curiously. "What do you want to do with them?"

Kris didn't look at them. "I don't care."

"I might have an idea," Adam said tentatively. "Firecracker's looking for something to decorate her newest acquisition."

"If she wants 'em," Kris shrugged. Firecracker had been investing in other bars as _Idolize:NYC_ continued to make a fortune. "With my blessing."

"Kickstand's dropping over later?" Kris nodded and Adam grinned. "We'll let him drag them over, okay?"

"Yeah, that works," Kris stood up with a final squeeze of Adam's hand. "I'mma find that chip reader."

Kris went back into the spare tech room. He looked at the big steel chest, running a finger over the bullet scars along the side. He hadn't ever looked inside but it was a Sternwain lock, standard mechanical lock. Kris could open it with a pen in under a minute. He was fleetingly curious but what was the point?

The past was better left buried. Kris went back to searching through the dusty tech for the reader.


End file.
